"Must-see webcast: The Science of Climate Change with 2 top scientists who helped author IPCC reports"

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The event will be webcast here Wednesday, from 12:00pm – 1:30pm. Details below.

[I wanted to repost this before noon so it would be in the subscriber feed today.]

The Science of Climate Change

February 3, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:30pm

About This Event

An overwhelming quantity of direct observations and analyses published by scientists in various disciplines around the world demonstrates that human activity has warmed the planet and altered the climate. The severity of the projected impacts of continuing on our current greenhouse gas emissions path has only increased in recent years.

Please join the Center for American Progress for an educational event featuring two respected scientists who have both helped author reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Michael MacCracken and Dr. Christopher Field will explain the IPCC’s assessment process, how we know what we know about human-caused climate change, what we have learned since the 2007 IPCC report, and why the science must inform public policy in the United States.

Featured Speakers:Christopher Field, Director, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and a coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment. In September 2008, he was elected co-chair of working group 2 of the IPCC, and will lead the next assessment on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.

Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute. From 1993-2002, Dr. MacCracken served as senior global change scientist to the interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, also serving as its first executive director from 1993 to 1997. From 1997 to 2001, he served as executive director of the USGCRP’s National Assessment Coordination Office. During this period, he also coordinated the official U.S. government reviews of several of the assessment reports prepared by the IPCC, and he was a co-author/contributing author for various chapters in the IPCC assessment reports.

I look forward to this talk. It looks great. And, I’m glad to see that a scientist from Stanford is taking part. But that leads me to this point:

On an issue of this immensity (global warming), universities should examine themselves, in this respect (at least):

Michael Boskin is a Stanford Prof. and a Fellow at Hoover (also at Stanford). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of ExxonMobil. Indeed, he has been on the Board for roughly 14 years.

When science tells us — loudly — that we have a problem, then wisdom dictates (pretty much) that we face and address the problem. ExxonMobil is not helping out — to put it mildly — in that cause.

In a case like this, should Michael Boskin need to choose between his membership on ExxonMobil’s Board and his continuing affiliation with Stanford? Should Stanford ask him to do so — or boot him? Does Boskin have some understanding of science that refutes what the IPCC, other scientists, and Stanford scientists understand about global warming? Or else, does he have a compelling and grounded ethical reason that justifies ExxonMobil’s stances on the matter, and if so, what does he think that is, exactly?

Is Stanford (and are our universities) nothing more than a piece of expensive real estate, from which large groups of scientists tell us that humankind has a big problem, while other folks (claiming the same affiliation) lead companies that ignore the problem, deceive the public, place profits over humankind, and fight hard to retain the dangerous status quo?

Is Stanford a piece of real estate, or is it a place of wisdom, responsibility, honesty, and courage?

ExxonMobil also has a Director (member of the Board) from Harvard, at Harvard Business School. In the distant past, I corresponded with him, unsatisfactorily. Harvard should be asking itself the same question.

I have deep respect for Stanford — except when they are playing Cal, in which case I favor the latter.